


Omphalos

by oceaxe



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Belly buttons, M/M, Non-consensual microchipping, Romance, Stalking?, alternating pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-17 23:34:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13087776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oceaxe/pseuds/oceaxe
Summary: Arthur can always find Eames, no matter where in the world he is. Eames gradually starts to suspect that there's a reason for that, beyond Arthur's unparalleled research skills.He's been microchipped.





	Omphalos

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Copgirl1964](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Copgirl1964/gifts).



> This is for Copgirl1964, who prompted "belly button." I always adore getting comments from you, Copgirl! Happy Holidays and I hope you enjoy this silly story!
> 
> Many thanks to Fiamac and AmoretteHD for the beta!

Eames kicked back in his chair and clenched his jaw as he listened to the architect drone on. She’d been yammering on for an hour now, about the mark’s history with drug abuse and how the level was designed to echo the treatment facilities she’d been through. It wasn’t as if the architect’s ideas were bad, per se. Eames could admit that it was pretty savvy to remind the mark of places in which she’d been vulnerable and receptive to new ideas. 

It was just that Arthur kept looking at her with open admiration, and it was starting to grate on his nerves. 

He found himself gently rubbing his fingers across his shirtfront, the tip of his middle finger catching against the indent of his navel again and again. One of the nice things about vintage clothes (Arthur would say thrifted or scrounged, but fuck Arthur) was that the fabric was nicely worn and thin enough for sensitive fingertips to feel the detail of the body underneath. 

This habit had developed slowly enough that even Eames, who made a habit of noticing habits, hadn’t noticed it for awhile. Ironically, he wasn’t sure that he ever would have twigged to it; except that about a year ago, he’d caught Arthur looking. Avidly watching Eames' hand as it rested on his stomach, fingers restlessly tracing the tiny oval under his striped button-down. It was just a fleeting glance, but it contained an emotion that Eames couldn’t place. 

So he did it again, and got another reaction—almost like chagrin, but not quite. It was tantalizingly complex, nearly impossible to interpret. So he tested, over and over, until he had the beginning of a hypothesis. 

Even then, it took him an embarrassingly long time to connect the dots. 

To be fair, one of the reasons Eames had been slow to draw the correct picture was that he’d initially put it down to Arthur desiring him. After all, he was no stranger to being the object of desire. But usually he’d put some effort in, and here he… well, it was untrue to say he hadn’t, but it had been years since he’d given up on wooing Arthur as the most lost of lost causes. Still, the thought was compelling enough that he wasted a few months trying to get a reaction that could definitively be called “sexual interest.” 

No dice.

Another factor that complicated the analysis was that Arthur really was that good at research. It stood to reason that, if he could unearth data from microfiche that allowed the Moynihan team to run rings around N’drangheta, he would be able to locate Eames, no matter what backwater he crawled to. At least some of the time. 

But not all of the time.

So eventually the dots all lined up, like stars in a constellation, and that constellation spelled ‘Mombasa.’ And ‘Dubai.’ And ‘Helsinki.’ And every other unlikely place Arthur had tracked him down for the past four years, up to and including a tiny village on the outskirts of Cusco—where he’d been holed up for three months while trying to shake a particularly persistent tail. 

All of which was to say, he’d been _chipped_. Normally, Eames would have been livid to find that he’d been tracked like a stray dog. Not to mention that the nonconsensual microchipping of a human being arguably contravened about twelve international treaties and the privacy laws of most civilized countries. 

Somehow, though, the knowledge didn’t exactly upset him. Instead, when the penny finally dropped, he felt a strange sense of … security. Warmth, almost. 

Someone was looking out for him. Someone knew where he was. 

And not just any someone.

Sad to say, that someone was currently balls-deep into the arsehole of Cerridwyn, metaphorically speaking. Eames hummed in doubt as he regarded her aquiline nose and broad shoulders. He supposed in this metaphor, it should be Cerridwyn who was balls-deep in Arthur, but parsing these thoughts led him down a rabbit-hole that was both arousing and sickening. (Also, potentially misogynistic in its insistence that the subordinate position was the receptive partner.) 

He redirected his mental meanderings and deliberately draped his hands across his midsection, letting an absent-minded expression settle on his face as his fingers set up a gentle, sweeping motion across the location of the implant. Under a pretense of trying to decipher some illegible smudges on the whiteboard, Eames scrutinised Arthur for a tell. 

Arthur glanced over, eyes glued to Eames’ slowly-drifting hand, and winced. 

Eames smiled blandly and looked away, his heart kicking up a notch. 

Bingo.

 

\---

 

Yeah, Eames knew about the chip. He knew about it for sure, and he was trying to get a reaction. Clearly, he wanted to confirm his suspicion that Arthur was the culprit. Who knew what he might do if he ever got actual evidence? 

Murder him, most likely. Eames was not a guy you fucked around with.

Arthur’s stomach flipped over as he tried to reassure himself that he hadn’t let his expression waver. He lay on his bed in the hotel room and thought about ordering dinner, but he didn’t have an appetite.

How many times had he kicked himself for failing to retrieve that microchip? It didn’t matter that leaving it in Eames’ body hadn’t been intentional at first—Arthur admitted to himself that he hadn’t tried as hard as he could to correct his mistake. Or tried at all, really, considering how easy it would have been to retrieve it while Eames was under, practicing any of the forges he’d done on the intervening ten jobs they’d done together. 

The truly troubling thing was that Arthur could not bring himself to articulate the why of it. Why he hadn’t fought Owens harder about the chipping in the first place. They’d had other options, and the risks had not out-weighed the benefits. Owens respected Arthur and if he’d put his foot down the way he should have, this problem wouldn’t exist. 

The worst part was that he’d kept using the app. Once he’d consciously admitted to himself that he wasn’t planning to remove the chip, he’d allowed himself to use it. To track Eames’ movement all over the globe.

And the more he used it, the easier it was to use without a second thought. He would track Eames even when there was no job coming up, just so he knew where he was… Jesus fucking christ, he was like Harry Potter obsessively tracking Draco Malfoy through the hallways of Hogwarts! Arthur stomped to the en suite shower and turned it on with a vicious twist of the handle, distantly noting how smoothly the fixture operated. Props to him for selecting the best second-tier luxury hotel in Singapore.

No props to him for allowing this absurd and humiliating situation to persist. And negative props for allowing a Harry Potter simile to cross his mind. 

The stress was getting to him. He stepped into the shower and tried to wash his concerns down the drain, which predictably didn’t work. 

This afternoon, he had been helpless to prevent himself watching Eames’ long fingers traverse the smooth expanse of his hideous shirts, plucking at the fabric, caressing the rim of his belly button. If only they’d chosen a different site. 

Arthur had been, frankly, torn about the location of the implant. It was only the size of a grain of rice, and could easily have been concealed in the inner elbow or behind the ear. Owens had suggested the belly button as a site that would go totally unnoticed, and Arthur hadn’t been able to articulate his objections without making his unwanted attraction to his colleague painfully obvious. 

So he’d watched the instructional video about twenty times, and then practiced on a stray dog (he’d rewarded it with a steak and when Eames encountered the mutt on the way out of the facility, had practically made out with him—Arthur refused to have any qualms about his treatment of the animal, though he would admit to some curiosity about what a dog’s Somnacin-induced dreams might be like). After making sure the chemist added extra sedative to the mix, Arthur waited until Eame was under, practicing his forge. Nerves alight and hands trembling, he unbuttoned the bottom of Eames’ mustard paisley shirt to reveal first his waistband, then a thick trail of hair, and then his belly button, which winked up at him innocently as if to say, ‘please be gentle with me.’ 

The incision was miniscule but frayed Arthur’s composure nonetheless. He attempted a stoic reserve about the whole thing, but was thwarted by his own awareness that he wanted to be seeing this part of Eames’ body revealed under very different circumstances.

The chip had slid in almost too easily, and his work was done. But he’d never gotten the feel of Eames’ flesh out of his mind. 

Arthur stepped out of the shower, the image and sense memory of Eames’ joytrail burning in his head once again. He slipped into his bed and flipped open his laptop, only to see an urgent message from an encrypted email address. 

When he opened it up, his heart rate spiked and he broke out in a cold sweat. 

_Mr. Pointman,  
I just thought you should know that Harrison turned up dead. It was definitely Balistreri’s team. They hacked his chip and ran him to ground. Tell your leads not to use chips in the future. Not secure._

Shit. It was going to have to come out asap. Arthur closed his laptop and resigned himself to a sleepless night and some creative sedation-via-Somnacin in the morning.

 

\---

 

Eames opened his eyes, a sticky feeling coating them and making him blink repeatedly. The world looked gauzy and indistinct, and come to think of it, he felt a bit indistinct, too. “Arthur, you need to tell Yusuf to correct the mix, it’s too dozy,” he said, head lolling over to find Arthur at the worktable.

“Tell him yourself,” Arthur replied in a monotone, eyes focused on the security camera he was modifying. 

Somewhere deep down, on some level, Arthur cared. Eames reminded himself that, so far as he knew, Arthur tracked no one else around the world.

Eames lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, hand beginning to seek out his navel again, outside his conscious volition. He almost stopped its progress, but saw out of the corner of his eye how Arthur’s body had gone rigid. Closing his eyes, he let his fingers trace the small, soft divot, over and over. It felt nice. Comforting. A little bit arousing, to be honest, knowing that Arthur was aware of what he was doing. Sending a message. “I know what you did, and I like it.” 

He let his head fall to the side again and slitted his eyes open a fraction, to see that Arthur’s gaze was riveted to his hand’s motions. Eames’ cock filled with a rush of blood and he opened his eyes all the way. If Arthur didn’t like the vision he made, drowsy and half-hard, he could always blame the mix. 

But Arthur liked it, to judge by the way his mouth fell open, his chest rising and falling rapidly. A flush stained his smooth cheeks and he dropped his gaze, and then the camera. Before Eames could process what was happening, Arthur had stood and fled the room. He heard the outer door clang shut after about 10 seconds.

Shit.

Eames rolled over on his side and winced. He’d felt an odd pinching sensation in his… he quickly unbuttoned his shirt and parted it. He couldn’t see anything from this angle, but when he probed inside, he could feel the slightest bit of roughness inside his navel. Like a stitch. 

The bastard had done the unthinkable. He’d taken it _out_.

He hauled himself off the chaise longue, his head still spinning a bit. By the time he’d rebuttoned his shirt and taken a piss, the sedative effects had mostly worn off. Eames felt a rising sense of indignation as he walked back into the Arthurless workroom. He stalked over to collect his phone and a few files from his desk. On his way past Arthur’s table, he noticed that in his haste, Arthur had left his phone. 

Into his pocket it went. Eames smiled a dark little smile, a plan forming in his mind as he left the facility.

It was the work of a few minutes’ research to find a hacker in the black markets of Singapore who could unlock Arthur’s phone. The actual hacking took a bit longer and a lot more money than Eames would have liked, but at the end of the day he knew which app Arthur had used to track him and what his numeric code and tag name were. He scribbled 10JSFKU*283JJJ)(#458290002923 and ‘pipedream’ on the back of a receipt, and stashed it in the inner pocket of his suit jacket.

Returning Arthur’s phone was trickier than he’d assumed it would be, because Arthur was actually in the facility when he got back. Eames wiped his prints meticulously and placed the phone in an alcove by the outside door, where Arthur would doubtless see it and where it was just barely plausible it might have dropped out of his pocket. 

Finding a supplier of microchips that would sync to Arthur’s app was exactly as tricky as he’d thought it would be, though he was pleasantly surprised that they were far less expensive than one would think. Amazon shipped it to the hotel a week before the job was scheduled to go down and an easily-bribed veterinarian had the chip back where it belonged in a jiffy with minimal fuss. 

If Arthur thought he was going to shake Eames so readily, he had another thought coming.

The only problem was, during the remainder of their stay in Singapore, Arthur displayed no sign that he’d even noticed Eames’ correction back to his preferred status quo. 

The job ended. 

Three months passed, during which Eames--growing more despondent with each successive relocation further afield--lugged himself from country to city to village to burgh, five different continents, no cellphone and a nagging awareness that there _had_ to be a job on the horizon for which he was needed. 

But there was no sign that Arthur knew where he was.

So it was that on Christmas Eve, he consoled him with a luxury suite in Reykjavik, and was just about to slip into the in-room spa pool, when there was a knock on his door. 

His heart lurched, but he chided himself that he was being stupid. Recent history had shown that this was not going to be Arthur at the door. Certainly not on Christmas eve, what a joke. 

In a fit of pique, he answered the door without covering himself with towel. Serve the room service waiter right for failing to be the only person on earth he wanted to see.

It was Arthur.

“What the fuck, Eames,” he said. 

 

\---

 

Eames answered the door naked. Of course he did. Arthur stood there, pissed off and freezing after his taxi had dropped him at the wrong hotel and he’d had to walk ten blocks in the snow. He deliberately, and with superhuman effort, did not allow his gaze to travel down the landscape of ink and muscle that stood two feet away.

“Would you care to come in?” Eames asked, and Arthur’s lips thinned. He brushed past him and into the suite, which was enormous and incredibly well-appointed. Eames excused himself to don a pair of cotton joggers and gestured for him to have a seat. Arthur pointedly glared out the window until Eames tapped him on the shoulder, holding a drink out to him. Which he took and downed half of in one go.

“I don’t know what game you’re playing here, Eames.” Arthur put his glass down on the table, trying to rein in his irritation. He knew it only overlay his fear; fear of being caught out, made to explain himself. 

“What do you mean?” It was patently clear he knew exactly what Arthur meant.

“You clearly know I had you chipped,” he bit out, and Eames flinched. “I’m -- I’m sorry about that. It wasn’t deliberate.” 

“Wasn’t deliberate, darling? Do you mean it was an accident? Whoops, my hand slipped and landed on your navel, while holding a scalpel and a microchip?” His tone was intolerably smug. 

Arthur sighed. It was time to just explain the entire debacle and have done with it. If Eames wanted to humiliate Arthur, well, Arthur probably deserved it. “You remember the Traeger job? With Owens? He insisted that all team members be chipped. Me included.”

Eames face fell. Arthur couldn’t imagine why.

“So you’ve been -- are you partnered with Owens? Are you still tracking the whole team? Does Clarice know that you..?”

“No, no of course not. I removed them from the others, but with the way the job went and the timing… well, yours didn’t get removed.”

“That job was three--no, four years ago.”

“I’m aware of that.”

Eames fixed him with a long look. “You could have removed it at any time. Waited til I was under, like you did on the last job. Easy peasy.”

Arthur didn’t know where to look.

“But you didn’t,” Eames continued, and Arthur’s stomach tightened and twisted. Here came the gut punch, the interrogation. Here was where the truth was dragged out of him.

“No,” he said simply, refusing to give Eames more ground. He should just apologize and leave. Apologize, explain that the chips are dangerous. Advise him to have it removed. Never speak of it again. Never work together again, most likely.

“You always knew where I was,” Eames said, musingly. 

“And now you know how,” Arthur said briskly, getting ready to walk out the door. 

“Oh, I’ve known how for awhile,” Eames said, watching Arthur’s face intently. It was like being under a microscope. Unwillingly surveilled. Turnabout, fair play, all that. “I just didn’t know why.” 

There was a long pause. 

“Do you?” he finally asked, getting up from the chair he’d been sitting in and coming closer.

“Do I what?” Arthur asked, his heart racing.

“Do you know why?”

“It was convenient to know where you were. You move around a lot.”

With that, Eames moved even closer, sitting inches away from him on the couch. 

“I do. And no one knows where I go. No one but you.”

The atmosphere shifted, got warmer. Arthur had to struggle to take in a breath, pinned under Eames’ hot, searching gaze. “I liked that,” he concluded. “I liked you knowing where I was. It felt… good.”

This wasn’t playing out at all the way Arthur had prepared for, not in the least. He swallowed and shifted, turning towards Eames so he could better track his movements. His movements which were incrementally encroaching on Arthur’s space.

“Did you like knowing where I was?” he murmured, leaning in close enough that Arthur could smell him, count his eyelashes. He nodded, helplessly, his throat and mouth incapable of forming any more words. 

“Good,” Eames said. “I want you to always know where I am.” And with that, he brushed his mouth against Arthur’s. It was the gentlest sweep of lips across lips and it lit Arthur on fire. He found himself pressing into the kiss as if doubt had never crossed his mind or muddled his intentions. Eames moaned into his mouth, a gorgeous, needy sound, and within seconds, Arthur had pushed him back onto the couch cushions. 

After Arthur got the joggers down and coaxed an orgasm from Eames on the couch, they made it to the bed for round two, which entailed Eames’ ankles over Arthur’s shoulders and Arthur pounding into him while intermittently staring at and stroking his lovely belly button. 

“So, darling,” Eames said with false nonchalance, curled up next to Arthur in the afterglow, “why did you take the chip out? Not because you were tired of tracking me?”

“They can be hacked,” Arthur said. “Harrison wound up dead on account of a hacked chip. We really ought to take care of that before-”

“Before round three?” Eames smiled beatifically. Arthur couldn’t help but kiss him then, and sad to say, they didn’t manage to extract the chip until much, much later.

 

Epilogue

 

Naturally, Arthur finds a non-hackable version of the chip and they get matching implants. Neither of them are able to look at the other’s belly button without getting immediately aroused. There are many money shots on stomachs that end with someone lovingly licking the come out of the other’s navel. And so, world peace was achieved. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

The End


End file.
